This magazine is owned and published co-operatively by its editors. It has no dividends to pay, and nobody is trying to make money out of it. A revolutionary and not a reform magazine; a magazine with a sense of humor and no respect for the respectable; frank; arrogant; impertinent; searching for the true causes, a magazine directed against rigidity and dogma where it is found, printing what is too naked or true for a money-making press; a magazine whose final policy is do to as it pleases and conciliate nobody, not even its readers.
Here we offer two beautiful facsimiles of the American radical magazine, "The Masses". When Max Eastman took over editorship of "The Masses" in December of 1912, he created a remarkably original radical journal, which was not afraid to offend critics and comrades alike, to the extent that under his management the irreverent magazine never made a profit, and was confiscated by the postal authorities, and then finally terminated by the courts for espionage. Based in the Bohemian haven of NYC's Greenwich Village, the magazine offered a selection of journalism, humor, and reviews, poetry and literature, fine visual art and cartoonery by a wide variety of artists. For example, represented in these particular issues are John Reed, Eugene Wood, Hayden Carruth, Inez Haynes Gillmore, Ellis O. Jones, Horatio Winslow, Thomas Seltzer, Mary Heaton Vorse, Joseph O'Brien, Louis Untermeyer, Leroy Scott, B. Russel Hertz, William English Walling, John Sloan, Arthur Young, Alice Beach Winter, Alexander Popini, H.J. Turner, Charles A. Winter, William Washburn Nutting, K.R. Chamberlain, Cornelia Barns, George Bellows, H.J. Glintenkamp, John Barber, Robert Minor, Boardman Robinson, Maurice Becker, E.Gminska, Howard Brubaker, Floyd Dell, Frank Bohn, Helen Marot, Arturo Giovannitti, Charles Wood, Dorothy Day, and, of course, Max Eastman, himself. These advocates of free love, Marxism, pacifism, birth control, the IWW, artistic idealism, women's suffrage, secularism, and civil rights and racial equality were very charming people and wonderful writers, critiqued for aesthetically rejecting modernism for a more romantic expression. The magazine's production is a central focus of the remarkable 1981 epic film, "Reds".
Offered here are two key issues of "The Masses": the November/December, 1917 issue, the "Swan Song Issue," which was the final issue, due to suppression by postal authorities for the magazine's opposition to the World War and conscription, the issue featuring, most notably, a farewell tribute to Jack London by Upton Sinclair; and the January, 1913 issue, which was the second issue after Max Eastman took over as editor and which features a marvelous poem from the jail cell of Arturo Giovannitti, held on a false charge during the Bread and Roses strike.
The scarcity of this magazine is due to the highly-acidic pulp the issues were printed on. If you can find a surviving copy, (no more than 5,000 of any one issue were ever produced), it will surely be falling apart. These remastered facsimiles are printed with archival inks on acid-free bond. The color covers are printed on acid-free heavyweight coated bond, and are of the highest quality, as the coating on the paper ensures the brightest colors by keeping the inks from absorbing into the threads of the pulp. These two issues measure approximately 11 x 8.25 inches; 20 and 44 pages, respectively.
This remarkable pair of facsimiles will make a wonderful addition to your collection or a marvelous gift.
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